Letter from Jen

18 years ago, I got my first-ever writing assignment: to report on the off-season happenings of a small private university’s women’s soccer team for the Salt Lake Tribune. I wasn’t a reporter. I was a clueless but eager twenty-something, freshly out of college and my NCAA running career, busy raising a newborn. But I knew I loved to write, and I figured I’d sort it out.

Soon after I filed the piece, the editor called me. The draft wasn’t perfect. But “most people just write about the basics or the stats,” he said. I’d written about the way the sun hazed across the goalposts on that steamy summer afternoon. I’d logged the drive-by conversations between the players. I’d given him a story.

In the weeks that followed, I became one of his go-to stringers, teaching myself to write news the same way I’d taught myself everything else in life: through grit and intuition, scrappiness and curiosity. I even hopped a bus with a team full of rowdy high school football players, documenting one of the weekly intrastate journeys so many rural Utah teams made. That story landed on the front page of the paper (and won some awards).

Ultimately—and sadly—journalism couldn’t pay the bills. But I made sure to bring that same grit to my copywriting work, from Salt Lake City to Brooklyn, NY. I’m high on standards and low on ego — I know what to sweat and what to shrug off. Like that friend who really gets you, I’m here to finish your sentences. To take you from concept to content with a little humor, a lot of intuition, some stellar storytelling, and zero bullshit.

Let’s get messy.